1. Copyright Statement
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material that is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure as they appear in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
2. Field of the Invention
This present invention relates to the field of information technology and more particularly to a mechanism for optimizing data center management software integration.
3. Description of Related Art
As business operations expand, corporate networks have evolved and now typically comprise one or more sophisticated data centers that are globally distributed but centrally managed. These data centers serve as repositories for the storage, management, and dissemination of data and information organized around a particular body of knowledge or pertaining to a particular business. Each data center may include application servers, database servers, web servers and other network infrastructure devices. To ensure efficient operation of the data center, commercially available management software products have been developed to monitor and manage faults that could impact data center operations. The entire system comprising the management software and the data center is known as the data center environment.
One such data center management software product is Enterprise Manager, a commercially available product offered by Oracle Corporation, the assignee of the present application. Enterprise Manager is an integrated management solution for managing the complete data center environment as one cohesive unit. Enterprise Manager facilitates the management of all services or instances within an enterprise data center, including hosts, databases, listeners, application servers, HTTP servers, collaboration suites, storage, network devices, load balancers and Web applications to extract information needed for critical and timely decisions. Other similar data center management software products include Hewlett Packard's OpenView, IBM's Tivoli Framework, Microsoft's Systems Management Server, LANDesk's Management Solutions Suite, Novell's ZENworks and CA's Unicenter.
In a typical data center, there are often multiple elements and instances, each of which comprise a running operating environment. In a typical data center, the elements may include application servers, application programs, storage devices network, and infrastructure devices such as load balancers, firewalls, intrusion detection devices, routers and the like. Each instance typically includes RDBMS software, table structure, stored procedures and other functionality. Each instance is a running database, such as an Oracle Database, made up of memory structures and background processes executing in computer memory. Multiple instances can be started for a single database on different nodes of a cluster.
A data center can often include hundreds of elements and thousands of instances for complex data structures. In order to learn the status of an element or instance, it must be queried by the data center management software. The status may be “up and running” if all is well, or may be “down” if there is a fault or issue. The data center management software may also manage the configuration of each element, as well as monitor and mange performance and alerts for each element and instances and storing the information for later analysis.
Information query is a common method to monitor the status and performance parameters, and manage configurations, events and faults of a data center. With prior art data center management software the information query is typically done in an application programming interface (“API”) driven approach, meaning that the query calls the specific API for each instance in order to check the status of each element or instance. For a complex data structure, the calling program might need to invoke multiple APIs multiple times, and may need to invoke the same APIs repetitively. While inefficient, this is currently the most common method to elicit the status of each instance.
Often a business may have multiple data centers managed by different data center management software products. For example, one data center may be handled by Oracle's Enterprise Manager, another by HP's OpenView, and yet another data center by IBM's Tivoli management software. IT administrators tasked with maintaining and transferring data between the data centers are commonly challenged by the potential for incompatibility. Specifically, each brand of data center management software has its own set of information query models that work with a specific library of APIs developed by each manufacturer. In order to query a data center, the IT administrator will need to know which query model works with which API, requiring proficiency with a large number of query-API constructs. Any change to the data center management software will necessitate learning new query models and new APIs.
Additionally, other problems arise when the IT administrator often does not have enough information about instances managed by the other data centers. An effective query requires knowledge of all of the instances available for query; however, as new data centers are acquired, the IT administrator is unlikely to know all of the instances under the new data center's control. These issues lead to an inefficient use of data center resources.
What is needed is a mechanism that not only responds to status requests regardless of the quantity of known and unknown instances, but also efficiently and conveniently integrates and accesses different data centers regardless of the data center management software that maintains those different data centers. The mechanism should also obviate the need for repetitive queries, and should also make learning different query models and APIs for different data centers unnecessary.